railroadmode of land transportation in which flange-wheeled vehicles move over two parallel steel rails, or tracks, either by self-propulsion or by the propulsion of a locomotive.

With the 20th century the railroad reached maturity. Railroad building continued on a fairly extensive scale in some parts of the world, notably in Canada, China, the Soviet Union, and Africa. But in most of the more developed countries construction tapered off until the second half of the century. Then it was revived, first by the demand for new urban transit railroads or the expansion of existing systems and, from 1970 onward, by the creation in Europe and Japan of new high-speed intercity passenger lines. The technological emphasis shifted to faster operations, more amenities for passengers, larger and more specialized freight cars, safer and more sophisticated signaling and traffic-control systems, and new types of motive power. Railroads in many of the more advanced countries also found themselves operating in a new climate of intense competition with other forms of transport.

In the first half of the 20th century, advances in railroad technology and operating practice were limited. One of the most far-reaching was the perfection of diesel traction as a more efficient alternative to steam and as a more cost-effective option than electrification where train movements were not intensive. Another was the move from mechanical signaling and telephonic traffic-control methods to electrical systems that enabled centralized control of considerable traffic areas. Also significant was the first use of continuously welded rail, a major contribution to improved vehicle riding and to longer track life and reduced maintenance costs.

From roughly 1960 onward the developed world’s railroads, pressed hard by highway and air competition, progressed swiftly into a new technological age. Steam traction had been eliminated from North America and disappeared from western Europe’s national railroads when British Railways dispensed with it in 1968. By 1990 steam power survived in significant—though steadily decreasing—numbers only in China, in parts of Africa, and on the Indian subcontinent; but in China the world’s only remaining steam locomotive factory switched to electric locomotive manufacture in 1991. Diesel-electric traction had become far more reliable and cheaper to run, though electric traction’s performance characteristics and operating costs were superior. But up to mid-century only high-traffic routes could optimize electric traction’s economy, not least because of the heavy capital cost of the fixed works required to set up the traction current supply system.

In the second half of the century, new technology achieved a steady reduction in electrification’s initial cost and a rapid advance in electric traction’s power and performance relative to locomotive size and weight. Particularly influential on both counts was the successful French pioneering of electrification with a direct supply of high-voltage alternating current at the industrial frequency. This stimulated particularly large electrification programs in China, Japan, South Korea, some eastern European countries, the Soviet Union, and India in particular. Those railroads already electrified to a considerable extent either kept their existing system or, with the perfection of locomotives able to work with up to four different types of traction voltage—whether alternating or direct current—adopted the high-voltage system for new electrification. Another stimulus for electrification came with the sharp rise in oil prices and the realization of the risks of dependence on imported oil as fuel that followed the 1973 Middle East crisis. By 1990 only a minority of western European trunk rail routes were still worked by diesel traction.

Few industries stood to benefit more than the railroads from the rapid advances in electronics, which found a wealth of applications from real-time operations monitoring and customer services to computer-based traffic control. The potential of solid-state devices for miniaturizing and enhancing on-board components was another key factor in electric traction development.

The latest technologies were deployed in the integrated design of high-performance track and vehicles, both freight and passenger, and for development of high-speed passenger systems to challenge air transport and the huge growth of private auto travel over improved national highways. Intermodal techniques were developed to keep a rail component in the trunk haul of high-rated freight, the source or destination of which could no longer be directly rail-served economically. The cost of maintaining high-quality track was reduced by the emergence of a wide range of mobile machinery capable of every task, from complete renewal of a length of line to ballast cleaning or packing, ultrasonic rail flaw detection, and electronic checking of track alignment.

At the same time, new trunk route construction was considerable in the developing countries. It was most extensive in China, India, and the Soviet Union, where the railroad remained the prime mover of people and freight. Increase of existing route capacity by multitracking and creation of new lines was essential for bulk movement of raw materials to expanding industries and to foster regional socioeconomic development. Between 1950 and 1990 China doubled the route-length of its national system to some 33,500 miles (54,000 kilometres); a further 1,000 miles of new lines were proposed in the railroad’s 1990–95 five-year plan. Many of the new routes, some more than 500 miles long, were built primarily for movement of coal from the country’s western fields to industry and ports in the east. From 1950 to 1990 Soviet Union Railways—then the world’s largest unitary railroad but since partitioned into individual state railways—increased route length from 71,000 to more than 90,000 miles. Extensions included a second Trans-Siberian line, the 1,954-mile Baikal-Amur Magistral (BAM). Begun in the late 1970s and for almost half its length threading permafrost territory where winter temperatures can reach −76° F (−60° C), BAM carried the first trains throughout its entire length in October 1989. In India new trunk route construction continued in the 1990s.

Construction of new railroads for high-speed passenger trains was pioneered by Japan. In 1957 a government study concluded that the existing line between Tokyo and Ōsaka, built to the historic Japanese track gauge of 3 feet 6 inches (1,067 millimetres), was incapable of upgrading to the needs of the densely populated and industrialized Tōkaidō coastal belt between the two cities. In April 1959 work began on a standard 4-feet-8.5-inch (1,435-millimetre), 320-mile Tokyo-Ōsaka railway engineered for the exclusive use of streamlined electric passenger trains. Running initially at a top speed of 130 miles per hour (mile/h; 210 kilometres per hour), these trains were until 1981 the world’s fastest. Opened in October 1964, this first Shinkansen (Japanese: “New Trunk Line”) was an immediate commercial success. By March 1975 it had been extended via a tunnel under the Kammon-Kaikyo Strait to Hakata in Kyushu island, to complete a 664-mile high-speed route from Tokyo. A 1973 government plan to build up to 12 more Shinkansen made no immediate progress chiefly because of economic problems arising from that year’s global energy crisis and the worsening losses of the subsequently dismantled Japanese National Railways. However, two further Shinkansen, the Tohoku and Joetsu, were inaugurated in 1982; and three more extensions were begun in 1991. Shinkansen top speed has been raised since the inauguration of the Tokyo-Ōsaka line; it is 150 mile/h on both Tohoku and Joetsu, and on one stretch of the latter it reaches 171 mile/h.

Except for its automatic speed-control signaling system, the first Shinkansen was essentially a derivation of the traction, vehicle, and infrastructure technology of the 1960s. France’s first high-speed, or Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV), line from Paris to Lyon, partially opened in September 1981 and commissioned throughout in October 1983, was the product of integrated infrastructure and train design based on more than two decades of research. Dedication of the new line to a single type of high-powered, lightweight train-set (a permanently coupled, invariable set of vehicles with inbuilt traction) enabled engineering of the infrastructure with gradients as steep as 3.5 percent, thereby minimizing earthwork costs, without detriment to maintenance of a 168-mile/h maximum speed. A second high-speed line, the TGV-Atlantique, from Paris to junctions near Le Mans and Tours with existing main lines serving western France, was opened in 1989–90. This was built with slightly easier ruling gradients, allowing maximum operating speed to be raised to 186 mile/h. In 1991 three further TGV lines were being built. The French government approved eventual construction of 14 more under a master plan that would extend TGV service from Paris to all major French cities, interconnect key provincial centres, and plug the French TGV network into the high-speed systems emerging in neighbouring countries. The latter included Britain, to which a rail tunnel under the English Channel would be opened in mid-1993. This tunnel railway would be directly connected to a new TGV route between Paris and Brussels, but a dedicated high-speed line from the English tunnel mouth to London for TGV trains between that city and Paris and Brussels would not be completed until the 21st century. The Netherlands government approved plans for new lines to connect its western group of cities with both the Paris-London-Brussels high-speed triangle and the high-speed intercity network being created in Germany.

In 1991 Germany completed new Hannover-Würzburg and Mannheim-Stuttgart lines engineered to carry both 174-mile/h passenger and 100-mile/h merchandise freight trains. Further new line construction was under way and planned, notably in Germany’s most heavily trafficked corridor, Cologne–Frankfurt am Main, and between Hannover and Berlin. In Italy the last stretch of a high-speed line from Rome to Florence, designed for 186-mile/h top speed, was finished in 1992; the first segment had been opened in 1977, but progress thereafter had been hampered by funding uncertainties and severe geologic problems encountered in the project’s tunneling. After some controversy over finance, a mixed holding company of the national railway and European banks was established in 1990 to extend the high-speed line north from Florence to Milan and south from Rome to Naples and Battipaglia and to build a new high-speed west-east route from Turin through Milan to Venice. In 1992 Spain completed a new 186-mile/h line between Madrid and Sevilla (Seville), built not to the country’s traditional broad 5-feet-6-inch (1,676-millimetre) gauge but to the European standard. It is operated by trains of French TGV design.

Outside Europe, South Korea and Taiwan were firmly committed to construction of new high-speed passenger lines at the start of the 1990s. Lines were planned to run between Seoul and Pusan and between Taipei and Kao-hsiung. Several other countries, including China, had published proposals for high-speed intercity projects. From the 1970s onward such schemes were advanced in a number of U.S. states, but by 1990 the only one close to surmounting all political, environmental, and financial hurdles was Texas. There a private enterprise consortium, Texas TGV, was franchised in 1991 by the state’s High Speed Rail Authority to develop the first Dallas-Houston segment of a 200-mile/h Dallas/Fort Worth–Houston–San Antonio–Austin network based on French TGV technology. In Canada the Quebec and Ontario governments were in 1991 studying the feasibility of a private enterprise proposal for a TGV-based, high-speed system connecting the cities of Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto.

In the last quarter of the century the gulf between the technology and efficiency of the industrialized and developing nations’ railroads was widening. In some African countries the national railroads were close to collapse because of the lack of adequate funds for maintenance, let alone asset renewals.

Cars

After the first crude beginnings, railroad-car design took divergent courses in North America and Europe, because of differing economic conditions and technological developments. Early cars on both continents were largely of two-axle design, but passenger-car builders soon began constructing cars with three and then four axles, the latter arranged in two four-wheel swivel trucks, or bogies. The trucks resulted in smoother riding qualities and also spread the weight of heavy vehicles over more axles.

Freight cars

Throughout the world the great majority of freight cars for all rail gauges are built with four axles, divided between two trucks. Because of the layout constraints of some freight terminals, several European railroads still purchase a proportion of two-axle vehicles, but these have a much longer wheelbase and hence a considerably larger load capacity than similar cars prevalent at mid-century. Some bulk mineral cars in Germany and the United States have been built with two three-axle trucks, and Russia and various other states of the former Soviet Union have a substantial number of freight cars carried on four two-axle trucks; these are the world’s largest. Concern to maximize payload capacity in relation to tare vehicle weight led in the century’s last quarter to U.S. and European adoption of articulation for cars in certain uses, notably intermodal transport. In this system a car comprises several frames or bodies (usually not more than five), which, where they adjoin, are permanently coupled and mounted on a single truck.

One type of vehicle that is fast disappearing in North America and virtually extinct in Europe is the caboose, or brake-van. With modern air-braking systems, the security of a very long train can be assured by fixing to its end car’s brake pipe a telemetry device that continually monitors pressure and automatically transmits its findings to the locomotive cab.

Before World War II, freight cars consisted almost entirely of four basic types: the semiwalled open car, the fully covered boxcar, the flatcar, and the tank car. Since then, railroads and car builders have developed a wide range of car types designed specifically for the ideal handling and competitive transport of individual goods or commodities. At the same time, the payload weight of bulk commodities that can be conveyed in a single car without undue track wear has been significantly increased by advances in truck design and, in North America, by growing use of aluminum instead of steel for bodywork, to reduce the car’s own tare weight. In Europe and North America, where highway competition demands faster rail movement of time-sensitive freight, cars for such traffic as perishable goods, high-value merchandise, and containers are designed to run at 75 mile/h. The French and German railways both operate some selected merchandise and intermodal trains at up to 100 mile/h to achieve overnight delivery between centres up to about 600 miles apart. In the United States, container trains traveling at 75 mile/h where route characteristics allow are scheduled to cover 2,200 miles in 52 hours.

In Europe and North America open cars for bulk mineral transport are generally designed for rapid discharge, either by being bodily rotated or through power-operated doors in the floor or lower sides of their hopper bodies. Modern North American four-axle coal cars typically have 100–110 tons’ payload capacity. In Europe, where tighter clearances necessitate smaller body dimensions and track is not designed for axle loadings as high as those accepted in North America, the payload capacity of similar four-axle cars is between 60 and 65 tons. High-sided open cars also are built with fully retractable sliding roofs, either metal or canvas, to facilitate overhead loading and discharge of cargoes needing protection in transit. In a variant of this concept gaining in European popularity for the transport of steel coil in particular, the sidewalls and roof are in two or more separate, integral, and overlapping assemblies; these can be slid over or under each other for loading or discharge of one section of the vehicle without exposing the remainder of the load.

Fully covered hopper cars or tank cars are available with pressure discharge for bulk movement of a variety of powders and solids. Tank cars are also purpose-designed for safe transport of a wide range of hazardous fluids.

Because of the rapid growth of intermodal transport in North America, boxcar design has seen fewer changes there than in western Europe. For ease of mechanized loading of palletized freight, modern European boxcars are built with their entire sidewalls divided into sliding and overlapping doors. Another option is to replace the sidewalls with a fully retractable, material-covered framework, so that the interior of the vehicle can be wholly opened up for loading or discharge. A typical North American boxcar for bulky but comparatively light cargo may have a load-area volume of up to 10,000 cubic feet (283 cubic metres); that of a modern four-axle European boxcar is 5,700 cubic feet. Boxcars are often fitted internally with movable partitions or other special fittings to brace loads such as products in sacks. Vehicles for transport of fragile merchandise have cushioned draft gear that absorbs any shocks sustained by the cars in train or yard shunting movement.

The automobile industry’s concentration of manufacture of individual models at specific plants has increased the railroads’ share of its transportation. As distances from manufacturing plant to dealer increase—and in Europe these may involve international transits—the security and economy offered by the railroad as a bulk transporter of finished autos have become more appreciated. In North America vertical clearances allow automobiles to be carried in triple-deck freight cars, but in Europe the limit is double-deck. Retractable flaps enable each deck of adjoining cars to be connected to form drive-through roadways on both levels for loading and discharge of an auto-transporter train. Such cars also are used for a type of service for motorists that is widespread in Europe but confined to one route in the United States: trains that combine transporters for autos with passenger cars for their occupants. These are mostly operated between ports or inland cities and vacation areas in the peak season. Special-purpose cars also have been developed for inter-plant movement of automobile components, including engines and body assemblies, and for regular delivery of spare parts to distribution areas.

Passenger cars

The first passenger cars were simply road coaches with flanged wheels. Almost from the beginning, railroads in the United States began to use longer, eight-wheel cars riding on two four-wheel trucks. In Britain and Europe, however, cars with more than six wheels were not introduced until the 1870s. Modern cars, for both local and long-distance service, have an entrance at one or both ends of the car. Commuter-service cars also have additional centre doors. Flexible connections between cars give passengers access to any car of a moving train, except when the coupling together of self-powered, reversible train-sets for multiple-unit operation makes passenger communication between one train-set and another impossible, because there is a driving cab at the extremity of each unit.

In the United States modern passenger cars are usually 85 feet long. In continental Europe the standard length of cars for conventional locomotive-hauled main-line service is now 86 feet 7 inches, but the cars of some high-speed train-sets are shorter, as are those of many urban transport multiple-unit cars and of railcars for secondary local services. Modern British cars are 64 feet 6 inches or 75 feet in length. The sharper curves of narrow-gauge railroads generally demand shorter length, but Spoornet, South Africa’s 3-foot-6-inch-gauge national railroad, operates cars 63 feet 5 inches long.

Since 1970, reduction of the weight of a car’s mechanical structures has become important to minimize the energy consumed in traction, particularly for high-speed vehicles. At the start of the 1990s, car bodies were still mostly of steel, but use of aluminum was increasing, not only for high-speed train cars. Modular construction techniques, simplifying the adaptation of a car body to different interior layouts and furniture, has encouraged railroads to standardize basic car structures for a variety of service requirements. For this reason, construction of small numbers of special-purpose cars demanding nonstandard bodies is not favoured; an example is the dome observation car, with a raised, glass roof section, popular in North America after World War II and also operated for some years by the German Federal Railway.

Modern truck design is the product of lengthy research into the interaction of wheel and rail, and into suspension systems, with the dual objectives of stable ride quality and minimum wear of track and wheel sets, especially at very high speed. The trucks of many modern cars have air suspension or a combination of air and metal springing. The entrance doors of all modern European cars are power-operated and capable of interlocking from a central control by the train’s conductor to prevent improper passenger use when the train is moving. Efficient soundproofing and insulation of car interiors from external noise and undesirable climatic conditions have become a major concern, particularly because of more widespread air-conditioning of cars. Very-high-speed train-sets must have their entire interior, including intercar gangways, externally sealed to prevent passenger discomfort from air pressure changes when they thread tunnels.

Brake systems

There are two principal types of continuous train braking system: vacuum, which now survives mostly on Third World railroads, and compressed air, the inherently greater efficiency of which has been improved by modern electric or electronic control systems. With either system brake application in the train’s driving cab is transmitted to all its vehicles; if a train becomes uncoupled on the move, interruption of the through-train connection of controls automatically applies brakes to both parts of the train. Modern passenger cars—and some freight cars—have disc brakes instead of wheel-tread shoes. Wheel sets of cars operating at 100 mile/h or more are fitted with devices to prevent wheel slip under heavy braking. On European cars designed for operation at 125 mile/h or more, and on Japanese Shinkansen train-sets, disc braking of wheel sets is supplemented by fitting electromagnetic track brakes to car trucks. Activated at the start of deceleration from high speed, these retard by the frictional resistance generated when bar magnets are lowered into contact with the rails. The latest Shinkansen train-sets have eddy current instead of electromagnetic track brakes. The eddy-current brake makes no contact with the rail (so is not subject to frictional wear) and is more powerful, but it sets up strong electromagnetic fields that require reinforced immunization of signaling circuitry; where operation of trains so equipped is intensive, there is a risk that eddy-current braking might heat rails to a degree that could cause them to deform.

Automatic body tilting

The permissible maximum speed of a passenger train through curves is the level beyond which a railroad considers passengers will suffer unacceptable centrifugal force; the limit beyond which derailment becomes a risk is considerably higher. On a line built for exclusive use of high-speed trains, curved track can be canted, or superelevated, to a degree specifically suited to those trains. The cant can be steeper than on a mixed-traffic route, where it must be a compromise between the ideal for fast passenger and slow, heavy freight trains, to avoid the latter bearing too severely on the curve’s inner rail. Consequently, on a dedicated high-speed passenger line, the extra degree of superelevation can raise quite significantly the curving speed possible without discomforting passengers from the effects of centrifugal force.

On existing mixed-traffic lines, however, passenger train speed through curves can be increased by equipping cars with devices that automatically tilt car bodies up to 9° toward the inward side of the curve, thereby adding to the degree of cant imparted by the track’s superelevation. There are two types of automatic body-tilting system. A passive system is more complex. It reacts to track curvature: that is, the body-tilting mechanism responds retroactively, if only by a fraction of a second, to its gauging of deficiency in the track’s superelevation relative to the speed at which the vehicle is traveling. An active system employs sensors to detect the transition to curved track and controls to measure the progressive degree of tilt applied by the tilt-operating mechanism in response to the sensor’s electronic signals as the curve itself is threaded. The sensors are usually fitted to the front vehicle of a tilt-body train-set, so that the tilt-body equipment on following vehicles operates in smooth, split-second anticipation of a track curve’s development. An active system can apply a higher degree of body-tilt than a passive system, but active systems impose constraints on some aspects of car design and add to the car’s capital and maintenance costs.

Cars for daytime service

The preferred interior layout of seating cars throughout the world is the open saloon (or parlor car), with the seats in bays on either side of a central aisle. This arrangement maximizes passenger capacity per car. Density of seating is less in an intercity car than in a short-haul commuter service car; the cars of some heavily used urban rapid-transit railroads, such as those of Japanese cities and Hong Kong, have minimal seating to maximize standing room. European cars of segregated six- or eight-seat compartments served by a corridor on one side of the car survive in considerable numbers. Marketing concern to tailor accommodation to the needs of specific passenger groups, such as businesspeople and families, led in the late 1980s to German production of some cars combining saloon and compartment sections and to French semi-compartment enclosure of the seating bays on one side of the first-class cars in TGV train-sets.

The great majority of cars in short-haul commuter service are still single-deck, but to maximize seating capacity there is an increasing use of double-deck cars for such operations in North America, Europe, and Australia. North American operators have tended to prefer a design that limits the upper level to a gallery along each side wall, but in most double-deck cars the upper level is wholly floor-separated from the lower. A four-car, double-deck electric multiple-unit of the Paris commuter network in France is 324 feet long and can seat 534 passengers.

Double-deck cars, suitably furnished, are found in long-haul intercity operation by Amtrak in the United States and in some Japanese Shinkansen train-sets. In the early 1990s French National Railways was building new TGV train-sets with every car double-decked except for the locomotives at each end. These cars exemplify modern weight-saving construction. French National Railways insists on a static load limit of 37,480 pounds on any axle of a vehicle traveling its high-speed lines. The French also prefer to articulate adjoining, nonpowered cars of their TGV train-sets over a single two-axle truck. Consequently, each 61-foot-4-inch-long double-deck car, providing up to 84 comfortable seats, must weigh no more than 74,960 pounds.

The range of passenger amenities in cars for intercity service increases. A coin- or card-operated public telephone facility, radio-linked to the national network, is increasingly available in western Europe and Japan and in the United States. One car of each German high-speed ICE train-set has for hire a small conference room with fax, photocopier, and typewriter equipment as well as telephone. Also becoming more common is the installation of seats with terminals for headphone reception of audio entertainment. The saloons of Spanish and many Japanese cars have video entertainment from receivers either suspended from the roof or mounted high on end walls, and small personal screens are mounted in some seat-backs of a German ICE train-set and some Japanese train-sets.

Because of its high operating costs, particularly in terms of staff, dining or restaurant car service of main meals entirely prepared and cooked in an on-train kitchen has been greatly reduced since World War II. Full meal service is widely available on intercity trains, but many railroads have switched to airline methods of wholly or partly preparing dishes in depots on the ground and finishing them for service in on-train galleys or small-size kitchens. This change is sometimes accompanied by substitution of at-seat service in place of a dining car, which has lost favour because its seats earn no fare revenue. At the same time, there has been a considerable increase in buffet counters for service of light snacks and drinks and also through-train trolley service of light refreshments. Most European railroads franchise their on-train catering services to specialist companies.

Cars for overnight travel

A crude car with bedding provision was operated in the United States as early as 1837, but sleeping cars with enclosed bedrooms did not appear until the last quarter of the 19th century. The compartments of most modern sleeping cars have, against one wall only, normal seating that is convertible to one bed; one or two additional beds are on hinged bases that are folded into the opposite compartment wall when not in use. A low-priced version of this concept is popular in Europe, where it is known as “couchette”; the compartments are devoid of washbasins, so that convertible seating and beds can be installed on both walls, and the beds do not have innerspring (sprung) mattresses. Double-deck sleeping cars operated by Amtrak in the United States have on their upper floor “economy” rooms for single or double occupancy; on the lower floor are similar rooms, a family room, a room specially arranged for handicapped travelers, a small lounge, and shower rooms. Rooms in modern European cars are of common size, the price of use depending on the number of beds to be occupied. The most lavish lounge facilities on overnight trains are found on some Japanese services.

Railroad track and roadway

Location and construction

Ideally, a railroad should be built in a straight line, over level ground, between large centres of trade and travel. In practice, this ideal is rarely approached. The location engineer, faced with the terrain to be traversed, must balance the cost of construction against annual maintenance and operating costs, as well as against the probable traffic volume and profit.

Thus, in areas of dense population and heavy industrial activities, the railroads were generally built for heavy duty, with minimum grades and curvature, heavy bridges, and perhaps multiple tracks. Examples include most of the main-line railroads of Britain and the European continent. In North and South America and elsewhere the country was sparsely settled, and the railroads had to be built at minimal costs. Thus, the lines were of lighter construction, with sharper grades and curves. As traffic grew, main routes were improved to increase their capacity and to reduce operating costs.

The gauge, or distance between the inside faces of the running rails, can affect the cost of building and equipping a railroad. About 60 percent of the world’s railroad mileage has been built to standard gauge, 4 feet 8 12 inches (1,435 millimetres). However, a considerable mileage of lines with narrower gauges has been constructed, mainly in undeveloped and sparsely settled countries. Use of a narrow gauge permits some saving in space. In addition, narrow-gauge cars and locomotives are generally smaller, lighter, and less costly than those used on standard-gauge lines. Disadvantages of a narrow gauge include the limitation on speed because of reduced lateral stability and limitations on the size of locomotives and cars.

The advent of modern high-capacity earth-moving machinery, developed mainly for highway construction, has made it economically feasible for many railroads to eliminate former adverse grades and curves through line changes. Graders, bulldozers, and similar equipment make it possible to dig deeper cuts through hillsides and to make higher fills where necessary to smooth out the profile of the track. Modern equipment has also helped to improve railroad roadbeds in other ways. Where the roadbed is unstable, for example, injecting concrete grout into the subgrade under pressure is a widely used technique. In planning roadbed improvements, as well as in new construction, railroads have drawn on modern soil-engineering techniques.

When track is laid on a completed roadbed, its foundation is ballast, usually of crushed rock, slag, or volcanic ash. The sleepers, or crossties, to which the rails are fastened, are embedded in the ballast. This is tightly compacted or tamped around the sleepers to keep the track precisely leveled and aligned. Efficient drainage of the ballast is critically important to prevent its destabilization. The depth of ballast depends on the characteristics of a line’s traffic; it must be considerably greater on a track carrying frequent high-speed passenger trains, for example, than on one used by medium-speed commuter trains. As an example of the parameters adopted for construction of a new high-speed line in Europe, in Germany the total width of a roadbed to carry two standard-gauge tracks averages about 45 feet. The tracks are laid so that their centres are 15 feet 5 inches apart. The standard depth of ballast is 11.8 inches (30 centimetres), but it is packed to a depth of 19.7 inches around the ends of the crossties or sleepers to ensure lateral stability.

In some situations where track maintenance is difficult, such as in some tunnels, or where drainage problems are acute, ballast and sleepers are replaced by continuous reinforced concrete support of the rails. This system, known as slab track, maintains accurate track geometry without maintenance attention for much longer periods than ballasted track, but its reduced maintenance costs are offset by higher first and renewal costs.

In western Europe considerable stretches of new high-speed railroad have been and are being built alongside multilane intercity highways. This simplifies location of the new railroad and minimizes its intrusion in rural landscape. Such sharing of alignment is feasible because tracks for the dedicated use of modern high-speed train-sets can be built with curves and gradients not far short of the most severe parameters tolerated in contemporary express highway construction.

Rail

The modern railroad rail has a flat bottom, and its cross section is much like an inverted T. An English engineer, Charles Vignoles, is credited with the invention of this design in the 1830s. A similar design also was developed by Robert L. Stevens, president of the Camden and Amboy Railroad in the United States.

Present-day rail is, in appearance, very similar to the early designs of Vignoles and Stevens. Actually, however, it is a highly refined product in terms of both engineering and metallurgy. Much study and research have produced designs that minimize internal stresses under the weight of traffic and thus prolong rail life. Sometimes the rail surface is hardened to reduce the wear of the rail under extremely heavy cars or on sharp curves. After they have been rolled at the steel mills, rails are allowed to cool slowly in special boxes. This controlled cooling minimizes internal shatter cracks, which at one time were a major cause of broken rails in track.

In Europe a standard rail length of 30 metres (98 feet five inches) is common. The weight of rail, for principal main-line use, is from about 55 kilograms per metre (about 111 pounds per yard) to 65 kilograms per metre (131 pounds per yard).

Railroads in the United States and Canada have used T-rails of hundreds of different cross sections. Many of these different sections are still in use, but there is a strong trend to standardizing on a few sections. In the 1990s most new rail in North America weighed 115 or 132 pounds per yard. The standard American rail section has a length of 39 feet. Some ore mining railroads in Western Australia employ rail weighing about 68 kilograms per metre (about 136 pounds per yard).

One of the most important developments is the welding of standard rails into long lengths. This continuous welded rail results in a smoother track that requires less maintenance. The rail is usually welded into lengths of between 320 yards and 0.25 mile. Once laid in track, these quarter-mile lengths are often welded together in turn to form rails several miles long without a break.

Welded rail was tried for the first time in 1933 in the United States. It was not until the 1950s, however, that railroads turned to welded rail in earnest. By 1990 welded rail was standard practice, or extensively used, on railroads throughout the industrialized world and was being adopted elsewhere to the extent that railroads’ finances allowed.

Controlling the temperature expansion of long welded rails proved not so difficult as first thought. It was found that the problem could be minimized by extensive anchorage of the rails to the sleepers or ties to prevent them from moving when the temperature changes, by the use of a heavy ballast section, and by heating the rails before laying to a temperature close to the mean temperature prevailing in the particular locality.

Rail fittings

Whether in standard or long welded lengths, rails are joined to each other and kept in alignment by fishplates or joint bars. The offset-head spike is the least expensive way of fastening the rails to wooden crossties, but several different types of screw spikes and clips are used. The rails may be attached directly to wooden crossties, but except on minor lines it is standard practice to seat the rail in a tie plate that distributes the load over a wider area of the tie. A screw or clip fitting must be used to attach rails to concrete ties. A pad of rubber or other resilient material is always used between the rail and a concrete tie.

Sleepers (crossties)

Timber has been used for railroad sleepers or ties almost from the beginning, and it is still the most common material for this purpose. The modern wood sleeper is treated with preservative chemical to improve its life. The cost of wood ties has risen steadily, creating interest in ties of other materials.

Steel ties have been used in certain European, African, and Asian countries. Concrete ties, usually reinforced with steel rods or wires, or ties consisting of concrete blocks joined by steel spacing bars are the popular alternative to wooden ties. A combination of concrete ties and long welded rails produces an exceptionally solid and smooth-riding form of track. Concrete ties have been standardized for the main lines of most European railroads and in Japan. Use of concrete elsewhere is increasing, although in North America widespread use was in 1990 confined to a few railroads.

Track maintenance

Modern machinery enables a small group of workers to maintain a relatively long stretch of railroad track. Machines are available to do all the necessary track maintenance tasks: removing and inserting ties, tamping the ballast, cleaning the ballast, excavation and replacement of worn ballast, spiking rail, tightening bolts, and aligning the track. Some machines are equipped to perform more than one task—for example, ballast tamping combined with track lining and leveling. Mechanized equipment also can renew rail, either in conventional bolted lengths or with long welded lengths; a modern machine of this type has built-in devices to lift and pass the old rail to flatcars at its rear and to bring forward and deposit new rail, so that it dispenses with separate crane vehicles.

Complete sections of track—rails and crossties—may be prefabricated and laid in the track by mechanical means. Rail-grinding machines run over the track to even out irregularities in the rail surface. Track-measurement cars, under their own power or coupled into regular trains, can record all aspects of track alignment and riding quality on moving charts, so that maintenance forces can pinpoint the specific locations needing corrective work. Detector cars move over the main-line tracks at intervals with electronic-inspection apparatus to locate any internal flaws in the rails.

The mechanization of track maintenance after World War II has constituted a technologic revolution comparable to the development of the diesel locomotive and electrification. Precision of operation, especially in maintenance of true track alignment, has gained much from the application of electronics to the machines’ measuring and control devices. In Europe in particular, highly sophisticated maintenance machines have come into use.

Auxiliary plant

Railroad fixed plant consists of much more than the track. More than two-thirds of Germany’s new Hannover-Würzburg high-speed line, for example, is in one of its tunnels or bridges or in cutting (excavations). Railroad civil-engineering forces also are concerned with constructing and maintaining thousands of buildings, ranging from small sheds to huge passenger terminals.

Bridges

The designer of a railroad bridge must allow for forces that result from the concentrated impact that occurs as a train moves onto the bridge; the pounding of wheels, the sidesway of the train, and the drag or push effect as a train is braked or started on a bridge. These factors mean that a railroad bridge must be of heavier construction than a highway bridge of equal length.

As axle loadings become heavier and train speeds higher, bridges need to be further strengthened. Another major objective in modern railroad-bridge construction is the need to minimize maintenance costs. The use of weathering steel, which needs no painting, all-welded construction, and permanent walkways for maintenance personnel contribute to this end. In the advanced countries there has been a widespread trend toward reinforced concrete structures.

Buildings

Railroad buildings in the 20th century have become fewer and more functional. With paved highways running almost everywhere in the developed countries, it has become more economical to concentrate both freight and passenger operations at fewer stations that are strategically sited and have good highway access. Provision for intermodal traffic exchange has become increasingly important. Particularly in conurbations, the forecourt and surroundings of new passenger stations are laid out to provide adequate and convenient areas for connecting bus or trolley-car services, for private automobile parking, or for so-called “kiss-and-ride”—automobiles that are discharging or picking up rail passengers. Many existing stations have had their surroundings reorganized to provide these facilities.

Many new local stations have been built to serve the spread of commuter and rapid-transit rail systems in the 20th century’s last quarter. However, except on new high-speed intercity lines, or at some airports, few sizable city stations have been newly constructed. On the other hand, there has been major reconstruction, updating, and expansion of facilities within the historic fabric of many major city stations in western Europe. Particularly in Germany one objective of this rebuilding has been to create easy interchange between ground-level platforms and new metro line platforms below ground. Reconstructed German city stations are also unparalleled for their range of shopping, snack-bar, and restaurant facilities. Another reason for reconstruction has been special provision for new high-speed train services; examples are the Atocha, Nord, and Waterloo termini in Madrid, Paris, and London, respectively. The majority of stations built to serve city airports, generally from platforms beneath a main airport terminal, are on branches of a city’s commuter rail system. Those at Frankfurt (Germany), Schiphol (The Netherlands), Gatwick (England), and Zurich and Geneva (Switzerland) are directly connected to their national railroad’s intercity passenger services.

Diesel and electric locomotives require few maintenance shops as compared with steam locomotives. Car shops, too, have been reduced in number and made more efficient through the use of process-line techniques. It is usually more efficient to construct new shop buildings rather than convert old ones to handle modern types of rolling stock.

Tunnels

Although very expensive, tunneling provides the most economical means for railroads to traverse mountainous terrain, to gain access to the heart of a crowded city, or, more recently in Japan and Europe, to project a railway across a maritime strait below its seabed. Railroad tunnels, however, confront the construction engineer with some unique problems, particularly in the ventilation of very long bores and in mastery of difficult geologic conditions.

Railroad operations and control

Because a railroad’s factory—its plant and train operations—may be spread out over thousands of miles and hundreds of communities, and because its trains use fixed tracks, unlike automobiles or airplanes, it has operating and service problems in some respects more complex than those of a major manufacturing installation. It is not surprising, therefore, that railroads have been among the pioneers in the use of improved methods of communication and control, from the telegraph to the electronic computer and automation techniques.

Communications

Railroads were among the first to adopt the electric telegraph and the telephone, both for dispatching trains and for handling other business messages. Today, the railroads are among the larger operators of electronic communications systems.

Radio

Railroads began experimenting with radio at a very early date, but it became practical to use train radio on a large scale only after World War II, when compact and reliable very-high-frequency two-way equipment was developed. In train operations radio permits communication between the front and rear of a long train, between two trains, and between trains and ground traffic controllers. It also is the medium for automatic transmission to ground staff of data generated by the microprocessor-based diagnostic equipment of modern traction and train-sets.

In terminals two-way radio greatly speeds yard-switching work. Through its use, widely separated elements of mechanized track-maintenance gangs can maintain contact with each other and with oncoming trains. Supervisory personnel often use radio in automobiles to maintain contact with the operations under their control.

As the demand for more railroad communication lines has grown, the traditional lineside telegraph wire system has been superseded. As early as 1959, the Pacific Great Eastern Railway in western Canada began to use microwave radio for all communications, doing away almost entirely with line wires. Other railroads all over the world turned to microwave in the 1970s and ’80s. More recently many railroads have adopted optical-fibre transmission systems. The high-capacity optical-fibre cable, lightweight and immune to electromagnetic interference, can integrate voice, data, and video channels in one system.

Computers

A major reason for the growing use of microwave and optical-fibre systems was the tremendously increased demand for circuits that developed from the railroads’ widespread use of electronic computers.

Earlier, railroads had been among the leaders in adopting punched-card and other advanced techniques of data processing. In the 1970s and ’80s there was a strong trend toward “total information” systems built around the computer. In rail freight operation, each field reporting point, usually a freight-yard office or terminal, is equipped with a computer input device. Through this device, full information about every car movement (or other action) taking place at that point can be placed directly into the central computer, usually located at company headquarters. From data received from all the field reporting points on the railroad, the computer can be programmed to produce a variety of outputs. These include train-consist reports (listing cars) for the terminal next ahead of a train, car-location reports for the railroad’s customer-service offices, car-movement information for the car-records department, revenue information for the accounting department, plus traffic-flow data and commodity statistics useful in market research and data on the freightcar needs at each location to aid in distributing empty cars for loading. Tracing of individual car movements can be elaborated by adoption of automatic car identification systems, in which each vehicle is fitted with an individually coded transponder that is read by strategically located electronic scanners at trackside. Major customers can be equipped for direct access to the railroad computer system, so that they can instantly monitor the status of their freight consignments. Relation of real-time inputs to nonvariable data banked in computer memory enables the railroad’s central computer to generate customer invoices automatically. Data banks can be developed to identify the optimal routing and equipment required for specific freight between given terminals, so that price quotations for new business can be swiftly computer-generated. By the end of the 1980s the ability of freight customers to transact all their business electronically was the objective of most major North American railroads.

Computers and microprocessors have found many other uses as a railroad management aid. For example, daily data on each locomotive’s mileage and any special attention it has needed can be fed by its operating depot into a central computer banking historical data on every locomotive operated by the railroad (an important accessory of this practice is microprocessor-based diagnostic equipment of the modern locomotive, described above). In the past, many railroads scheduled locomotive overhauls at arbitrarily assessed intervals, but use of a computer base enables overhaul of an individual locomotive to be precisely related to need, so that it is not unnecessarily withdrawn from traffic. The same procedure can be applied to passenger cars. Systems have been developed that optimize economical use of locomotives by integrated analysis of traffic trends, the real-time location of locomotives, and the railroad’s route characteristics to generate the ideal assignment of each locomotive from day to day. Another important application of computers has been to passenger train seat and sleeping berth reservation.

Computerization has given a railroad’s managers a complete, up-to-the-minute picture of almost every phase of its operations. Such complete information and control systems have proved a powerful tool for optimizing railroad operations, controlling costs, and producing better service.

Signaling

Railroad signals are a form of communication designed to inform the train crew, particularly the engine crew, of track conditions ahead and to tell it how to operate the train.

Methods of controlling train operations evolved over many years of trial and error. A common method in the early years was to run trains on a time-interval system; i.e., a train was required to leave a station a certain number of minutes behind an earlier train moving in the same direction. The development of distance-interval systems was a great improvement. In these so-called block systems, a train is prevented from entering a specific section of track until the train already in that section has left it.

Operation of single-track routes on the basis of a timetable alone, which was common on early lines in the United States, had the disadvantage that, if one train were delayed, others also would be delayed, since it was impossible to change the meeting points. By using the telegraph, and later the telephone, the dispatcher could issue orders to keep trains moving in unusual circumstances or to operate extra trains as required. This “timetable–train order” system is still used on many lines in the United States and Canada as well as in developing countries. It is often supplemented with automatic block signals to provide an additional safety factor, and radio is increasingly the means of communication between dispatchers and train crews.

Types of signals

The earliest form of railroad signal was simply a flag by day or a lamp at night. The first movable signal was a revolving board, introduced in the 1830s, followed in 1841 by the semaphore signal. One early type of American signal consisted of a large ball that was hoisted to the top of a pole to inform the engineman that he might proceed (hence, the origin of the term highball).

The semaphore signal was nearly universal until the early years of the 20th century, when it began to be superseded by the colour-light signal, which uses powerful electric lights to display its aspects. These are usually red, green, and yellow, either singly or in simultaneous display of two colours. The different colours are obtained either by rotating appropriate roundels or colour filters in front of a single beam or by providing separate bulbs and lenses for each colour. The number of lights and the range of aspects available from one signal can vary depending on its purpose. For instance, additional lights may be installed to the left or right of the main lights to warn a driver of divergence ahead from the through track. In Britain suitably angled strips of white lights are added to signals and illuminated when a divergent track is signaled. Red (stop or danger), green (track clear), and yellow (warning) have the same basic significance worldwide, but in Europe particularly they also are used in combinations of two colours to convey meanings that can vary from one railroad to another. Colour-light signaling is now standard on all but some minor rural lines of the world’s principal railways, and its use is spreading elsewhere.

Automated systems

The basis of much of today’s railroad signaling is the automatic block system, introduced in 1872 and one of the first examples of automation. It uses track circuits that are short-circuited by the wheels and axles of a train, putting the signals to the rear of the train, and to the front as well on single track, at the danger aspect. A track circuit is made by the two rails of a section of track, insulated at their ends. Electric current, fed into the section at one end, flows through a relay at the opposite end. The wheels of the train will then short-circuit the current supply and de-energize the relay.

In a conventional automatic block system, permissible headway between trains is determined by the fixed length of each block system and is therefore invariable. Modern electronics has made possible a so-called “moving block” system, in which block length is determined not by fixed ground distance but by the relative speeds and distance from each other of successive trains. In a typical moving block system, track devices transmit to receivers on each train continuous coded data on the status of trains ahead. Apparatus on a train compares this data with the train’s own location and speed, projects a safe stopping distance ahead, and continuously calculates maximum speed for maintenance of that headway. Moving block has been devised essentially for urban rapid-transit rail systems with heavy peak-hour traffic and on which maximum train speeds are not high; in such applications its flexibility by comparison with fixed block increases the possible throughput of trains over one track in a given period of time.

To ensure observance of restrictive signals, a basic form of automatic train control has been used by many major railroads since the 1920s. When a signal aspect is restrictive, an electromagnetic device is activated between the rails, which in turn causes an audible warning to sound in the cab of any train passing over it. If the operator fails to respond appropriately, after a short interval the train brakes are applied automatically. A refinement, generally known as automatic train protection (ATP), has been developed since World War II to provide continuous control of train speed. It has been applied principally to busy urban commuter and rapid-transit routes and to European and Japanese intercity high-speed routes. A display in the cab reproduces either the aspects of signals ahead or up to 10 different instructions of speed to be maintained, decelerated to, or accelerated to, according to the state of the track ahead. Failure to respond to a restrictive instruction automatically initiates both power reduction and braking. The cab displays are activated by on-train processing of coded impulses passed through either the running rails or track-mounted cable loops and picked up by inductive coils on the train. On some high-speed passenger lines the ATP system obviates use of traditional trackside signals.

Interlocking and routing

The first attempts at interlocking switches and signals were made in France in 1855 and in Britain in 1856. Interlocking at crossings and junctions prevents the displaying of a clear signal for one route when clearance has already been given to a train on a conflicting route. Route-setting or route-interlocking systems are modern extensions of this principle. With them the signaling operator or dispatcher can set up a complete route through a complicated track area by simply pushing buttons on a control panel. Most interlockings employ electrical relays, but adoption of computer-based solid-state interlocking began in Europe and Japan in the 1980s. Safeguard against malfunction is obtained by duplication or triplication; parallel computer systems are arranged to examine electronic route-setting commands in different ways, and only if automatic comparison shows no discrepancy in their proof that conflicting routes have been secured will the apparatus set the required route.

Electronics have greatly widened the scope for precise but at the same time labour-saving control of a busy railroad’s traffic by making it possible to oversee extensive areas from one signaling or dispatching centre. This development is widely known as centralized traffic control (CTC). In Britain, for example, one signaling centre can cover more than 200 miles of route with a principal city at the hub; the layout under control—used by intercity passenger, suburban passenger, and freight trains—may include 450 switch points and 1,200 possible route-settings. In the United States, the Union Pacific Railroad Company has consolidated dispatching control of its entire system in a single centre at its Omaha, Neb., headquarters.This concentration of signal and point control is possible because of the electronic ability to convey over a single communications channel a multitude of split-second, individually coded commands to ground apparatus and to return confirmations of compliance equally rapidly.

The functions of track circuits have been multiplied by electronics. The individual timetable number or alpha-numeric code of a train is entered into the signaling system at the track-circuited block where the train starts its journey. As the train moves from one block section to another, its occupation of successive track circuits automatically causes its number or code to move accordingly from one miniature illuminated window to another on the signaling centre’s layout displays. When the train moves from one control area to another, its code will automatically move to the next centre’s layout display. The real-time data on individual train progress generated by this system can be adapted for transmission to any interested railway office or, on a passenger railroad, to drive service information displays at stations. Particularly on rapid-transit systems, setting of junctions can be automated if train numbers or codes include an indication of routing, which is electronically detected when they occupy a track circuit at the approach to the divergence.

From the foregoing it is apparent that the means for complete automation of train operation exist. It has been applied to some private industrial rail systems since the early 1970s, and most of the capability has been built into some city metro systems. Extension of computer processing to the real-time data on train movement generated from track circuitry has further benefited control of major railroads’ traffic. In Europe’s latest centres controlling intensive passenger operations, operators can call up graphic video comparisons of actual train performance with schedule, projections of likely conflict at junctions where trains are not running on schedule, and recommendations for revision of train priorities to minimize disruption of scheduled operation. In North America, where many main lines are single-track, the Computer-Assisted Dispatching System (CADS) can relieve the operator of much routine work. At Union Pacific’s Omaha centre, once the dispatcher has entered a train’s identity and priority, the system automatically routes it accordingly, arranging its passing of other trains in loops as befits its priority. CADS automatically updates and modifies its determinations based on actual train movements and changing track conditions. The operator can intervene and override the system.

In early CTC installations the layout under a centre’s control was shown only on one panoramic display, in which appropriately located lights indicated the setting of each switch point and signal, the track-circuited sections occupied by trains, and in windows at each occupied section the identifying code of the train in question. In some installations route-setting buttons were incorporated in this display. In the most recent CTC centres the overall panoramic display is generally retained, but operators have colour video screens portraying close-ups of the areas under their specific control. In many such cases, a light-pencil or tracker-ball movement of a cursor is used to identify on the screen the route to be changed. Alternatively, the operators may have alphanumeric keyboards on which reset route codes may be entered.

On the main lines of North America, precise control of train movement is more difficult than in Europe, because block sections are much longer. To overcome the problem, the principal railroads of the United States and Canada combined in the 1980s to develop an Advanced Train Control Systems (ATCS) project, which would integrate the potential of the latest microelectronics and communications technologies. In fully realized ATCS, trains would continuously and automatically radio to the dispatching centre their exact location and speed; both would most likely be determined by a locomotive-mounted scanner’s reading of individually coded trackside transponders. Burlington Northern Railroad tested analysis by an on-board computer of signals received from global positioning satellites. In the dispatching centre, input from trains would be processed to arrive at the optimal speed for each train in relation to its priority, the proximity of other trains it must pass, and route characteristics. From this analysis, continuously updated instructions would be radio-transmitted to train locomotives and processed by on-board computers for reproduction on cab displays, so that trains would be driven with maximum regard for operating and fuel-consumption efficiency. ATCS was planned in such a way that it could be developed in several stages, or levels, up to full implementation.

Other automated systems

Among other automatic aids to railroad operation is the infrared “hotbox detector,” which, located at trackside, detects the presence of an overheated wheel bearing and alerts the train crew. The modern hotbox detector identifies the location in the train of the overheating and, employing synthesized voice recording, radios the details to the train crew. Broken flange detectors are used in major terminals to indicate the presence of damaged wheels. Dragging equipment detectors warn crews if a car’s brake rigging or other component is dragging on the track.

A major area for automation techniques in railroading is the large classification, or marshaling, yard. In such yards, freight cars from many different origins are sorted out and placed in new trains going to the appropriate destinations.

Most large classification yards have a “hump” over which cars are pushed. They then roll down from the hump by gravity, and each is routed into a classification or “bowl” track corresponding to its destination or where the train for the next stage of its transit is being formed.

By the 1970s, operations in the newer classification yards had reached a high degree of automation. The heart of such a yard is a central computer, into which is fed information concerning all cars in the yard or en route to it. As the cars are pushed up the hump (in some recently completed yards, by locomotives that are crewless and under remote radio control from the yard’s operations centre), electronic scanners confirm their identity by means of a light-reflective label, place the data (car owner, number, and type) in a computer, and then set switches to direct each car into the proper bowl track. Electronic speed-control equipment measures such factors as the weight, speed, and rolling friction of each car and operates electric or electropneumatic “retarders” to control the speed of each car as it rolls down from the hump. Every phase of the yard’s operations is monitored by a computerized management control and information system. With hand-held computers, ground staff can input data directly into the yard’s central computer.

Because such electronically equipped yards can sort cars with great efficiency, they eliminate the need to do such work at other, smaller yards. Thus, one large electronic yard usually permits the closing or curtailing of a dozen or more other yards. Most modern electronic yards have quickly paid for themselves out of operating savings—and this takes no account of the benefits of improved service to shippers.

Intermodal freight vehicles and systems

An important competitive development has been the perfection of intermodal freight transport systems. In North America and Europe they have been the outstanding growth area of rail freight activity since World War II. For the largest U.S. railroads, only coal now generates more carloadings per annum than intermodal traffic.

In overload intermodal transport the economy of the railroad as a bulk long-distance hauler is married to the superior efficiency and flexibility of highway transport for shorter-distance collection and delivery of individual consignments. Intermodal transportation also makes use of rail for the long haul accessible and viable to a manufacturer that is not directly rail-served and has no private siding.

Development

Initially, the emphasis in North America was on the rail piggybacking of highway trailers on flatcars (TOFC), which the Southern Pacific Railroad pioneered in 1953. By 1958 the practice had been adopted by 42 railroads; and by the beginning of the 1980s U.S. railroads were recording more than two million piggyback carloadings a year. In Europe, few railroads had clearances ample enough to accept a highway box trailer piggybacked on a flatcar of normal frame height. As shipping lines developed their container transport business in the early 1960s, European railroads concentrated initially on container-on-flatcar (COFC) intermodal systems. A few offered a range of small containers of their own design for internal traffic, but until the 1980s domestic as well as deep-sea COFC in Europe was dominated by the standard sizes of maritime containers. In the 1980s an increasing proportion of Europe’s internal COFC traffic used the swapbody, or demountable, which is similar in principle to, but more lightly constructed, cheaper, and easier to transship than the maritime container; the latter has to withstand stacking several deep on board ship and at ports, which is not a requisite for the swapbody. As its name suggests, the swapbody has highway truck or trailer body characteristics.

The container took on a growing role in North American intermodal transportation in the 1980s. American President Intermodal decided that containers originating from Pacific Rim countries to destinations in the Midwest and eastern United States were better sent by rail from western seaboard ports than shipped through the Panama Canal. To optimize the economics of rail landbridging, the shipping line furthered development of lightweight railcars articulating five low-slung well frames on each of which containers could be double-stacked within, or with minimal modification of, the vertical clearances of the principal route between West Coast ports and Chicago. At the same time, the shipping line marketed containers off-loaded in the east as the medium for rail shipment of merchandise from the east to the western states. This was influential in stimulating new interest in the container as a medium for domestic door-to-door transportation. Other shipping lines copied American President’s lead; railroads enlarged clearances to extend the scope of double-stack container transportation to the eastern and southern seaboards (Canadian railroads followed suit); and in the later 1980s both double-stack operation and the container’s share of total North American intermodal traffic rapidly expanded.

Operations

The overhead costs of COFC and TOFC are considerable. Both require terminals with high-capacity transshipment cranage and considerable space for internal traffic movement and storage. TOFC also has a cost penalty in the deadweight of the highway trailers’ running gear that has to be included in a TOFC train’s payload. Two principal courses have been taken by railroads to improve the economics of their intermodal operations. One is to limit their transshipment terminals to strategically located and well-equipped hubs, from which highway collection and delivery services radiate over longer distances; as a result, the railroad can carry the greater part of its intermodal traffic in full terminal-to-terminal trainloads, or unit trains. The other course has been to minimize the tare weight of rail intermodal vehicles by such techniques as skeletal frame construction and, as in the double-stack COFC units described above, articulation of car frames over a single truck. Even so, North American railroads have not been able to make competitively priced TOFC remunerative unless the rail component of the transit is more than about 600 miles.

Two different managerial approaches to intermodal freight service have developed in the United States. Some of the major railroads have organized to manage and market complete door-to-door transits themselves; others prefer simply to wholesale intermodal train space to third parties. These third parties organize, manage, and bill the whole door-to-door transit for an individual consignor.

Given the shorter intercity distances, European railroads have found it more difficult to operate viable TOFC services. The loading of a highway box trailer on a railcar of normal frame height without infringing European railroads’ reduced vertical clearances was solved by French National Railways in the 1950s. The answer was a railcar with floor pockets into which the trailer’s wheels could be slotted, so that the trailer’s floor ended up parallel with that of the railcar. Even so, there were limitations on the acceptable height of box trailers. Other railroads were prompted to begin TOFC in the 1960s when the availability of heavy tonnage cranes at new container terminals simplified the placing of trailers in the so-called “pocket” cars. Initial TOFC service development was primarily over long and mostly international trade routes, such as from The Netherlands, Belgium, and northern Germany to southern Germany, Austria, and Italy.

In 1978 the West German government decided to step up investment in its railways for environmental and energy-saving reasons. Its plans included a considerable subsidy of railroad intermodal operation, including TOFC. Similar support of intermodal development, for the same reasons, was subsequently provided for their national railways by the Austrian and Swiss governments. The German railroad (and also Scandinavian railroads) has more generous vertical clearances than the European norm. Whereas other European mainland railroads, even with pocket cars, can only operate TOFC over a few key trunk routes, the German Federal Railway could use the financial support to launch TOFC as well as COFC service between most of its major production and consumption areas.

The Germans, followed by the Austrians and Swiss, also developed a particularly costly intermodal technology. They call it “Rolling Highway” (Rollende Landstrasse), because it employs low-floor cars that, coupled into a train, form an uninterrupted drive-on, drive-off roadway for highway trucks or tractor-trailer rigs. Rolling Highway cars are carried on four- or six-axle trucks with wheels of only 14-inch diameter so as to lower their floors sufficiently to secure the extra vertical clearance for highway vehicles loaded without their wheels pocketed. Platforms bridge the gap between the close-coupled railcars. To allow highway vehicles to drive on or off the train yet enable a locomotive to couple to it without difficulty, the train-end low-floor cars have normal-height draft-gear headstocks that are hinged and can be swung aside to open up the train’s roadway. Truck drivers travel in a passenger car added to the train.

In the face of growing trade between northwestern and southeastern Europe, Austria and Switzerland have imposed restraints on use of their countries as a transit corridor by over-the-highway freight to safeguard their environments. Consequently, the highest intermodal traffic growth rates in Europe were registered by their national railroads in the 1980s and early ’90s; and Rolling Highway services proliferated on their transalpine routes. Primarily to provide for increase in intermodal traffic, and in particular Rolling Highway trains, the Swiss parliament in 1991 approved a government plan to bore new rail tunnels on each of its key north-south transalpine routes, the Gotthard and the Lötschberg. The new tunnels will be much longer than those at the summit of the existing routes; thus their tracks will be free of the present routes’ steep gradients and sharp curves on either side of their tunnels.

Passenger intermodals

To save motorists the negotiation of mountain passes, especially in winter, two Swiss railroads shuttle drive-on, drive-off trains for automobiles between terminals at the extremities of their transalpine tunnels. This practice has been elaborated for Channel Tunnel rail transport of private automobiles, buses, and trucks between Britain and France. The tunnel’s rail traffic is partly conventional trains, but it has been bored to dimensions that allow auto transporter trains to employ cars of unprecedented size. Consequently, these trains are limited to shuttle operation between terminals on the British and French coasts. The fully enclosed, double-deck cars for automobile traffic measure 18 feet 4 inches high and 13 feet 5 inches wide; the latter dimension allows room for automobile passengers, who are carried in their vehicle, to dismount and use the car’s toilet or auto-buffet while the train threads the tunnel. The transporter cars for buses and trucks are single-deck.

Bi-modals

A further type of intermodal vehicle is the bi-modal. This is a trailer with normal rear wheels and braking for over-the-highway movement, but which can be converted to a rail vehicle by raising its wheeled end to remove its highway wheels from contact with the ground and half-inserting a fully equipped railroad truck to the rear of the highway wheels. The other half of the truck is available to support a bi-modal trailer’s front end when vehicles are coupled to form a railroad train. This vehicle coupling by the truck is supported by locking devices that include connections for through-train air braking. At the front end of a bi-modal car train, the half of the truck not supporting a trailer is fitted with conventional headstock and draft gear to which a locomotive can couple. The essential advantage of the bi-modal car is that its terminal requirement for transformation from highway to railroad vehicle is limited to a hard surface between the rails and at rail-top level to support the highway wheels during changeover. The transition can be effected by the highway tractor driver. The principal drawback is the increased vehicle cost (about 15 percent for European models) by comparison with an orthodox highway trailer.

Bi-modal development after World War II was initiated in the early 1960s by the RoadRailer, which was devised by engineers of what was then the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad in the United States. The technique had little lasting success until the 1980s, when models were produced having payload volume and weight capacity commensurate with those of a conventional highway trailer. But by 1990 the only U.S. railroad to operate a network of RoadRailer train services was Norfolk Southern, which segregated the operation from its other intermodal activity under the management of a subsidiary company. At the end of the 1980s several western European railroads became interested in the bi-modal technique, and by 1991 some had prototypes in trial service. All were basically similar to the RoadRailer, and some were locally built under RoadRailer license, but more than 10 differing designs had been produced by European manufacturers.

The future of railroads

For more than a century the railroad was the dominant form of land transportation in much of the world. It was, and remains, the one land carrier that can carry almost anything anywhere the tracks go and do it at a true cost lower than other types of land or air transportation.

Today, however, other modes of transportation have been developed to the point at which they can do certain transportation jobs more effectively than the railroads. Pipelines can carry liquids and some solids over long distances economically. Airplanes, with their great speed, can carry some types of light, valuable freight at a savings; and trucks offer speed and flexibility, especially for shorter hauls. The private automobile, operating over modern highways, and the airplane have taken over much passenger traffic formerly handled on rails. The motorbus is an effective competitor for the short- to medium-distance passenger business. The modern barge, operating on improved inland waterways systems, can move many commodities over specific routes at very low cost.

Undeniably, these competitors of the railroad can do a better job on some types of transportation tasks. The development of these newer modes, therefore, has changed the role of the railroad from that of the general-purpose carrier to that of a more specialized carrier, just as the other modes are specialized.

The future role of the railroad as a specialized carrier will vary in different nations. In general, however, the railroad is particularly strong in the following areas:

1. It is especially effective in moving large volumes of bulk commodities, such as coal, ores, chemicals, and grain. Where circular track layouts at source and destination allow unit trains to operate in a continuous circuit, and there are facilities for rapid train loading and discharge, the railroad can be competitive over short distances. One such coal-mine-to-electricity-generating-station operation in Britain involves a distance of only 30 miles. The railroad can also move large volumes of finished merchandise economically at relatively high speeds over medium to long distances.

2. The railroad can efficiently handle containers in large volumes between major centres and, in some countries, trucks on “piggyback” trains (see above). This has been matched in many cases by the creation at strategic locations of transshipment terminals specifically equipped for easy and rapid transfer of a particular commodity from railcar to truck or to temporary warehousing. Commodities for which railhead distribution centres of this kind have been developed include steel and forestry and paper products. The modern railroad’s considerable role in delivery of new automobiles has similarly required purpose-built terminals in distribution areas. The development of specialized terminal interfaces with highway transport in a widening range of commodities, as well as in intermodal COFC and TOFC, is prompting many railroads to seek closer cooperation with the highway freight industry.

In an age of industrial concern to minimize inventory and materials in the supply pipeline, so-called “just-in-time” delivery has become crucial. Railroads in the industrialized world have learned that to compete with trucks for high-value freight, such as components for the automobile industry or food products for retail markets, they must not only promise fast transit times but also keep to schedule with the same precision as passenger trains.

3. The railroad is the best mode for moving large numbers of commuters between big metropolitan centres and the outlying suburban areas, and, in its metro form, of distributing passengers within large cities.

4. Very-high-speed intercity passenger services can be successful when operated with modern equipment at medium to long distances. Particularly in western Europe, Japan, and the New York City–Washington, D.C., corridor of the United States, railroad intercity passenger business has been successfully protected, even increased, by a combination of higher speed, more comfortable and smoother-riding cars, and much greater frequency of service. On an electrified line the marginal costs of intensifying service are reduced because of the traction’s uninterrupted availability for work. With its TGV operation, French National Railways has proved that the train can regain considerable traffic from airlines over intercity distances of up to 400 miles; in 1991 it was researching with French industry an increase in speed to 218 mile/h for future TGV development so as to raise the distance at which air travel was powerfully challenged to 620 miles.

In short, the railroad under modern conditions is at its best as a high-volume carrier of both passengers and freight. There are, of course, many exceptions to this general rule.

In looking at the future place of railroads, three other factors should be noted:

1. A railroad disturbs the natural environment far less than a highway or an air-transport system. It also produces less pollutants per unit of transportation performed than either highway or air transportation. These factors have become more significant as society increasingly concerns itself with the need to preserve the environment and to reduce air, water, and noise pollution.

2. A railroad is far more efficient in its use of fuel than are either highway or air transportation. Concern over the best use of these resources is in many countries placing more political emphasis on rail transportation.

3. While much public money has gone into technological research on the newer forms of transportation and into constructing facilities for them, in all but a few countries relatively little has been spent to improve railroad technology. Nor has there been investment in railroad infrastructure at a level to compare proportionally with that applied to highways, especially in developing countries. Thus, even the most advanced of today’s railroad plants and services, with few exceptions, do not represent the best that is possible from the railroad.

Modern intercity passenger trains

The TGV of France

On the second of the country’s new purpose-built high-speed lines, TGV-Atlantique, trains were scheduled to run the 125 miles between Paris and Le Mans in either direction at an average speed of between 134 and 139 mile/h. On France’s first high-speed line, the TGV-Sudest, where maximum permissible speed is 168 mile/h, trains were scheduled to run between Paris and Lyon in either direction at an average speed of 133 mile/h. Beyond the extremities of these new high-speed lines, most TGV trains continued over historic railroad that had been upgraded wherever possible for their use at 100 to 140 mile/h.

Japanese Shinkansen

The most intensive train services at very high speed were in 1991 provided by the so-called “Bullet Trains” of Japan’s new standard rail-gauge lines, the Shinkansen. The timetables of the first of these lines, the New Tōkaidō, and its Sanyo extension running from Tokyo to Fukuoka, showed more than 300 trains daily. Every hour of the day Tokyo and Ōsaka were connected in each direction by at least four limited-stop trains; many of them were scheduled to complete the Tokyo-Ōsaka run in less than 3 hours. The fastest “Bullet Trains” were to be found on the later Shinkansen, the Jōetsu and Tōhoku, which operated at a higher maximum speed.

European regular-interval services

In many western European railroads, intercity passenger services on all or a majority of principal routes are scheduled at fixed intervals of the clock, to make timetables more convenient and easier for travelers to remember. In several countries, the railroads’ shorter-distance and commuter services are similarly patterned. Apart from benefit to their purely local users, this obtains prompt and regular connection between long- and short-haul services at major stations, thereby greatly extending the range of itineraries for which trains become a competitive alternative to use of the automobile. On the longer and busiest intercity routes, the timetable interval between daytime trains is normally one hour (but with supplementary trains in the morning and evening business travel peaks); however, over the shorter intercity routes of countries such as Belgium, The Netherlands, and Switzerland or between cities where track is used by two or more overlapping intercity routes, frequency can be half-hourly.

In 1991 the farthest distance with daylong intercity service every half hour (more in the peaks) was the 269 miles between London and Newcastle on Britain’s East Coast main line. British Rail has not built a new high-speed railway but has upgraded considerable distances of its historic main lines radiating from London to the north and west.

Because Germany has no clearly preeminent city, its intercity rail map is intricate, forming basically a central ring from which branches project principally to the north, south, and southeast. Within this structure hourly-interval trains follow six principal routes. At key junction stations, mostly on the central ring, trains on different routes are timed to converge, generally on opposite sides of an island platform, for easy exchange of passengers. This makes the railroad competitive for travel between any pair of major German cities once every hour, with minimal inconvenience if a change of train en route is required. Because of Germany’s central position in Europe, many of these hourly services are now provided by the rising number of international daytime trains conforming to agreed standards of speed, comfort, amenities, and technical equipment that European railways run cooperatively under the brand name EuroCity.

Before World War II the German rail system was east-west oriented, and principal intercity passenger routes radiated from Berlin. Partition of Germany left the West German railroad, the German Federal (DB), with many lines in the country’s hilly centre that had not been engineered for the primarily north-south trunk role they were then required to play. Since the 1960s public money has been heavily invested in upgrading historic routes for higher speed and enlarging their operating capacity wherever the topography allows, but opportunities to reengineer economically for speed in excess of 100 mile/h have been limited. Several lengthy new high-speed lines are therefore planned by the government to bypass the most speed-constricting and overtaxed segments of the DB’s intercity network. The first two, between Hannover and Würzburg and between Mannheim and Stuttgart, were completed in 1991. Between stops on the new lines, the trains average 112 to 116 mile/h. Since the unification of Germany in 1990, new east-west routes (such as Berlin-Hannover) have been planned for high-speed rail.

Italy’s fastest intercity services in 1991 were provided between Rome and Milan by electric train-sets motored on all axles and equipped with an automatic body-tilting system. Designed to run at 155 mile/h on the new high-speed line between Rome and Florence and able to curve faster than conventional rolling stock north of Florence, these trains could be scheduled to run between Rome and Milan in about four hours, including stops at Bologna and Florence.

The U.S. MetrolinersIn the United States the strong emphasis on highways and air-travel facilities had, by the 1960s, caused most railroads in the United States to cut their passenger operations drastically. In the Northeast megalopolis extending roughly from Boston through New York City to Washington, D.C., however, the dense population presented a market that could be exploited by a fast modern rail passenger service. In 1976 Amtrak, which had taken over the train service

in 1971, also took over the route. At the same time, a federally funded Northeast Corridor Improvement Project was begun to upgrade the route for high speed and extend to Boston its existing electrification, presently terminating at New Haven, Conn., northeast of New York City. By 1991 the route between New York and Washington could be run at high speed by Metroliner trains. The Metroliners are hauled by lightweight, 7,000-horsepower electric locomotives of Swedish design. In the face of severe airline shuttle competition, Amtrak’s frequent train service has become the dominant public passenger carrier in the New York–Washington corridor. In 1990 Amtrak claimed more than one-third of the combined rail and air passenger market between the two citiesModern railways

Diesel-electric locomotion and electronic systems

With the 20th century the railroad reached maturity. Railroad building continued on a fairly extensive scale in some parts of the world, notably in Canada, China, the Soviet Union, and Africa. But in most of the more developed countries construction tapered off until the second half of the century. Then it was revived, first by the demand for new urban transit railroads or the expansion of existing systems and, from 1970 onward, by the creation in Europe and Japan of new high-speed intercity passenger lines. The technological emphasis shifted to faster operations, more amenities for passengers, larger and more specialized freight cars, safer and more sophisticated signaling and traffic-control systems, and new types of motive power. Railroads in many of the more advanced countries also found themselves operating in a new climate of intense competition with other forms of transport.

In the first half of the 20th century, advances in railroad technology and operating practice were limited. One of the most far-reaching was the perfection of diesel traction as a more efficient alternative to steam and as a more cost-effective option than electrification where train movements were not intensive. Another was the move from mechanical signaling and telephonic traffic-control methods to electrical systems that enabled centralized control of considerable traffic areas. Also significant was the first use of continuously welded rail, a major contribution to improved vehicle riding and to longer track life and reduced maintenance costs.

From roughly 1960 onward the developed world’s railroads, pressed hard by highway and air competition, progressed swiftly into a new technological age. Steam traction had been eliminated from North America and disappeared from western Europe’s national railroads when British Railways dispensed with it in 1968. By 1990 steam power survived in significant—though steadily decreasing—numbers only in China, in parts of Africa, and on the Indian subcontinent; but in China the world’s only remaining steam locomotive factory switched to electric locomotive manufacture in 1991. Diesel-electric traction had become far more reliable and cheaper to run, though electric traction’s performance characteristics and operating costs were superior. But up to mid-century only high-traffic routes could optimize electric traction’s economy, not least because of the heavy capital cost of the fixed works required to set up the traction current supply system.

In the second half of the century, new technology achieved a steady reduction in electrification’s initial cost and a rapid advance in electric traction’s power and performance relative to locomotive size and weight. Particularly influential on both counts was the successful French pioneering of electrification with a direct supply of high-voltage alternating current at the industrial frequency. This stimulated particularly large electrification programs in China, Japan, South Korea, some eastern European countries, the Soviet Union, and India in particular. Those railroads already electrified to a considerable extent either kept their existing system or, with the perfection of locomotives able to work with up to four different types of traction voltage—whether alternating or direct current—adopted the high-voltage system for new electrification. Another stimulus for electrification came with the sharp rise in oil prices and the realization of the risks of dependence on imported oil as fuel that followed the 1973 Middle East crisis. By 1990 only a minority of western European trunk rail routes were still worked by diesel traction.

Few industries stood to benefit more than the railroads from the rapid advances in electronics, which found a wealth of applications from real-time operations monitoring and customer services to computer-based traffic control. The potential of solid-state devices for miniaturizing and enhancing on-board components was another key factor in electric traction development.

The latest technologies were deployed in the integrated design of high-performance track and vehicles, both freight and passenger, and for development of high-speed passenger systems to challenge air transport and the huge growth of private auto travel over improved national highways. Intermodal techniques were developed to keep a rail component in the trunk haul of high-rated freight, the source or destination of which could no longer be directly rail-served economically. The cost of maintaining high-quality track was reduced by the emergence of a wide range of mobile machinery capable of every task, from complete renewal of a length of line to ballast cleaning or packing, ultrasonic rail flaw detection, and electronic checking of track alignment.

At the same time, new trunk route construction was considerable in the developing countries. It was most extensive in China, India, and the Soviet Union, where the railroad remained the prime mover of people and freight. Increase of existing route capacity by multitracking and creation of new lines was essential for bulk movement of raw materials to expanding industries and to foster regional socioeconomic development. Between 1950 and 1990 China doubled the route-length of its national system to some 33,500 miles (54,000 kilometres); a further 1,000 miles of new lines were proposed in the railroad’s 1990–95 five-year plan. Many of the new routes, some more than 500 miles long, were built primarily for movement of coal from the country’s western fields to industry and ports in the east. From 1950 to 1990 Soviet Union Railways—then the world’s largest unitary railroad but since partitioned into individual state railways—increased route length from 71,000 to more than 90,000 miles. Extensions included a second Trans-Siberian line, the 1,954-mile Baikal-Amur Magistral (BAM). Begun in the late 1970s and for almost half its length threading permafrost territory where winter temperatures can reach −76° F (−60° C), BAM carried the first trains throughout its entire length in October 1989. In India new trunk route construction continued in the 1990s.

High-speed passenger lines

Construction of new railroads for high-speed passenger trains was pioneered by Japan. In 1957 a government study concluded that the existing line between Tokyo and Ōsaka, built to the historic Japanese track gauge of 3 feet 6 inches (1,067 millimetres), was incapable of upgrading to the needs of the densely populated and industrialized Tōkaidō coastal belt between the two cities. In April 1959 work began on a standard 4-feet-8.5-inch (1,435-millimetre), 320-mile Tokyo-Ōsaka railway engineered for the exclusive use of streamlined electric passenger trains. Running initially at a top speed of 130 miles per hour (mile/h; 210 kilometres per hour), these trains were until 1981 the world’s fastest. Opened in October 1964, this first Shinkansen (Japanese: “New Trunk Line”) was an immediate commercial success. By March 1975 it had been extended via a tunnel under the Kammon-Kaikyo Strait to Hakata in Kyushu island, to complete a 664-mile high-speed route from Tokyo. A 1973 government plan to build up to 12 more Shinkansen made no immediate progress chiefly because of economic problems arising from that year’s global energy crisis and the worsening losses of the subsequently dismantled Japanese National Railways. However, two further Shinkansen, the Tohoku and Joetsu, were inaugurated in 1982; and three more extensions were begun in 1991. Shinkansen top speed has been raised since the inauguration of the Tokyo-Ōsaka line; it is 150 mile/h on both Tohoku and Joetsu, and on one stretch of the latter it reaches 171 mile/h.

Except for its automatic speed-control signaling system, the first Shinkansen was essentially a derivation of the traction, vehicle, and infrastructure technology of the 1960s. France’s first high-speed, or Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV), line from Paris to Lyon, partially opened in September 1981 and commissioned throughout in October 1983, was the product of integrated infrastructure and train design based on more than two decades of research. Dedication of the new line to a single type of high-powered, lightweight train-set (a permanently coupled, invariable set of vehicles with inbuilt traction) enabled engineering of the infrastructure with gradients as steep as 3.5 percent, thereby minimizing earthwork costs, without detriment to maintenance of a 168-mile/h maximum speed. A second high-speed line, the TGV-Atlantique, from Paris to junctions near Le Mans and Tours with existing main lines serving western France, was opened in 1989–90. This was built with slightly easier ruling gradients, allowing maximum operating speed to be raised to 186 mile/h. In 1991 three further TGV lines were being built. The French government approved eventual construction of 14 more under a master plan that would extend TGV service from Paris to all major French cities, interconnect key provincial centres, and plug the French TGV network into the high-speed systems emerging in neighbouring countries. The latter included Britain, to which a rail tunnel under the English Channel would be opened in mid-1993. This tunnel railway would be directly connected to a new TGV route between Paris and Brussels, but a dedicated high-speed line from the English tunnel mouth to London for TGV trains between that city and Paris and Brussels would not be completed until the 21st century. The Netherlands government approved plans for new lines to connect its western group of cities with both the Paris-London-Brussels high-speed triangle and the high-speed intercity network being created in Germany.

In 1991 Germany completed new Hannover-Würzburg and Mannheim-Stuttgart lines engineered to carry both 174-mile/h passenger and 100-mile/h merchandise freight trains. Further new line construction was under way and planned, notably in Germany’s most heavily trafficked corridor, Cologne–Frankfurt am Main, and between Hannover and Berlin. In Italy the last stretch of a high-speed line from Rome to Florence, designed for 186-mile/h top speed, was finished in 1992; the first segment had been opened in 1977, but progress thereafter had been hampered by funding uncertainties and severe geologic problems encountered in the project’s tunneling. After some controversy over finance, a mixed holding company of the national railway and European banks was established in 1990 to extend the high-speed line north from Florence to Milan and south from Rome to Naples and Battipaglia and to build a new high-speed west-east route from Turin through Milan to Venice. In 1992 Spain completed a new 186-mile/h line between Madrid and Sevilla (Seville), built not to the country’s traditional broad 5-feet-6-inch (1,676-millimetre) gauge but to the European standard. It is operated by trains of French TGV design.

Outside Europe, South Korea and Taiwan were firmly committed to construction of new high-speed passenger lines at the start of the 1990s. Lines were planned to run between Seoul and Pusan and between Taipei and Kao-hsiung. Several other countries, including China, had published proposals for high-speed intercity projects. From the 1970s onward such schemes were advanced in a number of U.S. states, but by 1990 the only one close to surmounting all political, environmental, and financial hurdles was Texas. There a private enterprise consortium, Texas TGV, was franchised in 1991 by the state’s High Speed Rail Authority to develop the first Dallas-Houston segment of a 200-mile/h Dallas/Fort Worth–Houston–San Antonio–Austin network based on French TGV technology. In Canada the Quebec and Ontario governments were in 1991 studying the feasibility of a private enterprise proposal for a TGV-based, high-speed system connecting the cities of Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto.

Advanced systems

In the 1960s and early 1970s, considerable interest developed in the possibility of building tracked passenger vehicles that could travel much faster than conventional trains. Experiments conducted by the Japanese National Railways and others at that time led to belief that the practical upper limit of speed for flanged-wheel railroad vehicles might be in the range of 150 to 200 miles (240 to 320 kilometres) per hour. By the 1990s, however, the French had practically demonstrated that the ceiling was at least 300 mile/h.

In the 1970s, pursuit of alternative high-speed technology centred on the tracked air-cushion vehicle, as exemplified by the French Aerotrain. Air-cushion vehicles use a “cushion” of low-pressure air to “float” the vehicle away from the group or the guideway; they have no wheels and, when running, no contact with the guideway.

Technical development of the Aerotrain was completed in the late 1970s. The experimental vehicle ran on an elevated beamway that had a vertical centre guide beam, using fans for both lift and lateral guidance. The ultimate experimental vehicle, propelled by a fan jet outfitted with a noise-reducing device, attained a speed of 235 mile/h. However, unhappy at the project’s rising costs, anxious for economies in the aftermath of the 1973 oil price crisis, and worried by public protests at the noise of the test vehicle, the French government terminated the Aerotrain project in 1974.

From the 1970s, interest in an alternative high-speed technology centred on magnetic levitation, or maglev. This vehicle rides on an air cushion created by electromagnetic reaction between an on-board device and another embedded in its guideway. Propulsion and braking are achieved by varying the frequency and voltage of a linear motor system embodied in the guideway and reacting with magnets on the vehicles. Two systems have been under development, one in Germany and the other in Japan. The German system, known as Transrapid (see photograph), achieves levitation by magnetic attraction; deep skirtings on its vehicles, wrapping around the outer rims of the guideway, contain levitation and guidance electromagnets which, when energized, are attracted to ferromagnetic armature rails at the guideway’s extremities and lift the vehicle. The Japanese technology is based on the magnetic repulsion of high-power, helium-cooled superconductor magnets on the vehicle and coils of the same polarity in the guideway. On a test track in northern Germany, a full-size Transrapid passenger-carrying vehicle had by 1990 been tested at up to 271 mile/h. In Japan the highest speed achieved by a full-size test vehicle was 250 mile/h; but in 1979 a scaled-down, non-passenger-carrying vehicle had attained 321 mile/h.

By 1991 maglev had been successfully applied in Britain to a short-distance, fully automated, low-speed people-mover shuttle between Birmingham’s airport and a nearby intercity rail station. However, in the light of French TGV speed, there was political support for creation of an intercity maglev route only in Germany. Even there, up to mid-1991 no funding had been agreed for a 22-mile Transrapid line between the Cologne and Düsseldorf airports that the government had approved for construction as a demonstration system. In western Europe every estimate submitted for construction of a Transrapid maglev intercity line, which requires an elevated guideway, was more expensive per mile than that for a new high-speed wheel-on-rail line between the same points. Furthermore, all of Europe’s new high-speed wheel-on-rail lines were compatible with traditional railroads, so that their new high-speed trains could freely range beyond the limits of their new lines. A maglev line would be completely incompatible; to adopt maglev could be the start of duplicating existing rail intercity networks, which in light of rapid advances in conventional rail speed would be economically illogical.

In Japan, on the other hand, there was rising political support for construction of a maglev line connecting Tokyo and Ōsaka to relieve the overtaxed Shinkansen between those two cities. The aim was a journey time of only one hour between them. In the United States, too, there was considerable backing within the federal government and in some states for the development of maglev as an intercity passenger medium. A consortium promoting the German Transrapid technology was franchised by the California-Nevada SuperSpeed Ground Transportation Commission to finance and build a 270-mile line from Anaheim, Calif., to Las Vegas, Nev.

At the beginning of the 1990s, however, many facets of maglev reliability, safety, and ride quality were not fully proved. Furthermore, trial operation had been confined to running a single vehicle over a single-guideway test track. Nowhere had any experience been gained in operating the equivalent of a double-track intercity railroad, with switch points for intertrack movements and an intensive train service in each direction.

Current developments in railway transportation are documented and interpreted in Jane’s World Railways (annual). The history of railway technology is presented in Geoffrey Freeman Allen, Railways: Past, Present & Future (1982); George H. Drury (comp.), The Historical Guide to North American Railroads, updated ed. (1991); Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, Hear the Train Blow: A Pictorial Epic of America in the Railroad Age (1952); Geoffrey Freeman Allen, Railways of the Twentieth Century (1983); and Gustav Reder, The World of Steam Locomotives (1974; originally published in German, 1974).

Histories of railroads frequently address their social and political impact, as in Nicholas Faith, The World the Railways Made (1990); Patrick O’Brien, Railways and the Economic Development of Western Europe, 1830–1914 (1983); Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant: The Growth, Rejection, and Rebirth of a Vital American Force (1992); and Clarence B. Davis et al. (eds.), Railway Imperialism (1991).